Theatre in Review: Fun Home (The Public Theater)

	Sydney Lucas and Michael Cerveris. Photo Joan Marcus

At first glance, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home seems like a perfectly dreadful basis for a musical -- which makes the achievement now onstage at the Public Theater all the more remarkable. It's a graphic memoir -- a self-described "tragicomic" -- that probes the bizarre details of a childhood spent with an eccentric tyrant of a father who, when not teaching high school English or working as a funeral director, obsessively restored the family home into a 19th-century showplace. At its heart is a terrible irony; as Bechdel came of age, embracing her lesbian sexual orientation -- she eventually created the syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For -- her father struggled with the fact of a lifetime spent in the closet. A few weeks after she came out to her parents, he stepped in front of an oncoming truck.

Doesn't really sing, does it? And yet, by remaining stubbornly faithful to their source material, the creators of Fun Home find a theatrical language for this sorrowful story, identifying laughter in the strangest places and also allowing its heartbreaking emotions to soar. By refusing to give in to the conventions of standard musical theatre, Fun Home manages to be the most powerful musical of the season to date.

"How many times have I told you? Do not get in the coffins!" This was apparently a typical remark in the Bechdel household, which should give you an idea of what passed for normality among them. Even so, Bruce Bechdel's life was dictated by convention and a sense of duty. Following a brief army interlude in Germany, he returned home to take up the family business, christening it the "Fun Home," perhaps as a way of distancing himself from his macabre daily duties. Certainly Alison and her two brothers took his cue. In "Welcome to the Fun Home," one of the show's more uproarious numbers, all three kids enumerate, in their best Jackson 5 fashion, the benefits of the Bechdel Funeral Home in the manner of a hard-sell television commercial of the '70s.

Then again, there is the moment when Bruce calls young Alison into his work room, asking her to do him a minor favor while he is preparing a corpse. Alison obeys him but is left baffled; exactly what sort of message is he trying to send? What did he want her to see? "My dad and I were exactly alike. My dad and I were nothing alike." This is the conundrum that eats away at Alison all her life; it becomes more urgent as she wonders if she played any role in Bruce's suicide.

Fun Home, the book, jumps back and forth in time, attempting to make sense out of a household where the bizarre and the everyday were inseparable; so, too, Lisa Kron's libretto fractures time as Alison tries to solve the mystery of a man who was both an intimate and a total stranger. The grown-up Alison sifts through her memories, looking on at younger versions of herself, both as a grade-schooler and as a college freshman, fighting to escape Bruce's control, and, later, struggling to understand the hidden-in-plain-sight mystery of his nature.

It's not easy. An obsessive collector, Bruce fills the house with antiques, falling into a fury if a single detail is disturbed. "A volume out of place could start World War Three," sings Helen, Bruce's neglected, clear-eyed wife, who finds release from her dead-end marriage by starring in local community theatre productions. The immaculately turned-out Bruce is forever trying to dress Alison in frilly frocks, oblivious to (or in denial about) her boyish taste in clothes. He demands that she wear a barrette, noting that it will keep her hair out of her eyes. "So would a crew cut," she replies, in a tone that indicates that this little girl means business. Bruce, who is nothing if not well read, imprints his tastes on Alison; when a college professor announces that The Sun Also Rises is informed by a Jungian subtext, both father and daughter are comically united in their agony.

So when Bruce gives his college-age daughter a volume of Colette's works, is he knowingly introducing her to the work of a great lesbian artist? It's one of a hundred unanswerable questions. What about the young men he hires to assist him in his home-renovation efforts? When Bruce takes the kids on a trip to New York, staying in an apartment on Bleecker Street, where does he go at night? When Bruce tells Alison he is seeing a psychiatrist because he is bad at heart -- in fact, he is under court order, following an incident with a local boy -- does he really have no idea of the impact of this remark?

This trickily structured, often achingly painful, story is made all the more powerful thanks to the songs by Kron and Jeanine Tesori, whose quietly driving melodies contain a powerful yearning. The opening numbers, "It All Comes Back" and "Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue," efficiently set the stage for what follows, and "Raincoat of Love" wickedly reinvents the Bechdels along the lines of the Partridge Family. The show's final third yields one powerful aria after another: "Ring of Keys," in which the little girl Alison, in a diner with Bruce, spots a butch lesbian and suddenly feels the shock of recognition; "Days and Days," in which Helen pours out her grief over a lifetime of missed opportunities; and "Telephone Wire," featuring the college-age Alison in the car with Bruce, desperately trying to find a way for them to speak honestly. Providing a devastating climax is "Edges of the World," Bruce's terrible realization that the world has passed him by.

Sam Gold's production is a delicate high-wire act, mining all the humor to be found in this stupendously dysfunctional clan's daily life while never losing sight of the story's tragic arc. Beth Malone's Alison is a compelling, and constantly watchful, presence, sifting through the past like an archeologist seeking clues to a lost way of life. Also fine are Sydney Lucas as Small Alison, a tough customer if ever there was one, and Alexandra Socha as Medium Alison, who comically goes from gay panic to gay pride in zero-to-sixty fashion. There are also fine contributions from Roberta Colindrez as Joan, Alison's infinitely tactful college girlfriend, and Joel Perez as all of the young men who cross Bruce's path.

Anchoring Fun Home, however, is a pair of star turns. At first, Judy Kuhn seems like luxury casting for Helen, who spends much of the show in the background, but then she tears into "Days and Days," a revelation of a lifetime's sorrow, and her presence is thoroughly justified. Michael Cerveris' Bruce is a singular creation, even for this fine actor, a man whose entire life has been a gigantic act of sublimation, who now finds himself trapped in his own evasions. "I might still break a heart or two," he sings more than once, trying to convince himself that there is still happiness to be had, and each time your heart is likely to break for him.

It can't be easy to design a show based on the work of a noted visual artist. David Zinn's set design uses a stageful of furniture to create different locations; later on, in a nifty coup de théâtre, we see the interior of the Bechdel home as if through the eyes of Joan, and for the first time we realize the stifling effect of its perfection. Zinn also designed the costumes, which manage to fit the characters in every time frame. Ben Stanton's lighting efficiently carves out a variety of intimate playing areas on the large Newman Theater stage and also adds amusing bits of glitz to "Raincoat of Love." The projections, by Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg, range from glittery additions to "Raincoat of Love" to Alison's pencil scratches, as seen on a black curtain. Kai Harada's meticulous sound design is a model of audibility.

It all goes to prove that, with careful handling, fine musical theatre can be made out of the most unpromising materials if everyone involved is fearless enough. Out of one family's corrosive secrets, they have made a singular and extraordinarily moving piece of work.--David Barbour